- World Liberty Financial has partnered with Sui.
- The Trump-backed DeFi project plans to buy Sui assets for its strategic crypto reserve.
- There may be more to WLFI's deals than meets the eye.
World Liberty Financial is expanding its token holdings.
The Trump-backed DeFi project will “explore product development opportunities” with layer 1 blockchain Sui, and “plans to include Sui assets in ‘Macro Strategy,’” the project’s token stockpile.
That’s according to the Sui Foundation, which outlined the plans in a Thursday blog post.
Sui’s native token, which has a market value of over $9 billion, jumped as much as 18% on the announcement.
The Sui deal is the latest in a growing list of crypto projects cosying up to World Liberty Financial, which has raised $300 million through sales of its WLFI token to investors since October.
The news comes as World Liberty Financial buys up $20 million worth of so-called Wrapped Bitcoin, Ether, and Move tokens days before crypto executives are set to visit the White House to discuss policy.
The Sui blockchain uses the Move programming language, and is often pinned as a faster, more scalable competitor to Solana. Sui has $1.5 billion worth of crypto locked in its DeFi protocols, per DefiLlama data.
The crypto tokens World Liberty Financial buys often benefit from a surge in investor interest.
Trump’s WLFI
When World Liberty bought $2 million worth of the Move blockchain’s token in January, it soared some 23%.
World Liberty Financial isn’t owned by President Donald Trump, but he promotes it and benefits from its success.
Trump and his sons Donald Jr, Eric, and Barron receive a split of the proceeds from the project’s WLFI token sales and future revenue, along with the project’s founders and collaborators, which include longtime Trump ally Steven Witkoff.
‘Macro Strategy’
World Liberty Financial has been stockpiling crypto for months.
At first, it wasn’t initially clear why, but last month, onlookers received some clarity when the project announced it had been building what it called a “strategic token reserve,” called Macro Strategy.
The reserve is intended to mitigate market volatility, foster growth, and build trust, the project said in an X post.
However, there may be more going on with the token reserve than the project lets on.
A February investigation by Blockworks found that World Liberty Financial had courted crypto teams for token swap deals.
Representatives for World Liberty Financial approached crypto teams with the offer to sell them at least $10 million worth of its WLFI token with a 10% fee. If accepted, World Liberty Financial then purchased the same amount of the buyer’s crypto token, sources told Blockworks.
Two crypto project founders also told DL News they had been offered similar deals.
The Sui Foundation did not respond to a DL News request for comment.
World Liberty Financial’s token reserve includes Wrapped Bitcoin and Ether, as well as Tron’s TRX token, Ethena’s ENA token, and Ondo Finance’s ONDO token, along with several others.
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.